Purpose:It
was show in last years experiment, Heads
or Tails who Wins? that the coin toss ends up relatively as a 50%
either way. The premise of that experiment being that the pennies used
are relatively perfect pennies. In this bi-week experiment, the goal is
to test the probability of heads or tails in a loaded penny.

Hypothesis:Because
the penny is being altered, it becomes the hypothesis of this experiment
that by changing one side of the penny, the nuetral odds now would be shifted
towards either heads or tails.

Equipment: Needed
for this experiment is one penny, tape, and pen and paper, calculator optional.

Procedure:In
this experiment the penny was loaded by placing two strips of tape on the
heads side of the penny to add more weight. The penny was tossed 500 times.

Results:

Side

Number of Times came
up

Percentage came up

Heads (taped side)

254/500

50.8%

Tails (untaped side)

246/500

49.2%

Conclusion: Based on the results, the penny kept
the 50/50 chance alive. It is noted that this does not prove that a penny
toss cannot be rigged, however, this does shed some light on the effectiveness
of rigging it by weight. More experimentation must be done as
to whether adding more weight or weighting just the top half of one side
may affect the outcomes. An explanation to this may be because the penny's
outcome seems solely dependant on what point the spinning penny hits the
ground. As long as the added weight does not cause the penny to stop spinning
it should continue to be a random event.